No,
now that you mention it, I'm not particularly fond of motherhood or the
American flag either; but one must tackle beloved American icons one at a time.

To be sure, though, this reprehensible
confection commands attention primarily as one aspect of a larger problem that
has tormented the American conscience for so long that it now represents a
national obsession we must face, and overcome. Its origins are unclear, but one
factor may have been a legendary figure named John Chapman, better known as
Johnny Appleseed. Once celebrated in American history books in the days when
they actually mentioned white males, he was purportedly so enamored of apples
that he dedicated his life to traveling all over the country, polluting the
landscape with scattered apple seeds so that no American citizen would ever be
deprived of his favorite treat. It is interesting to speculate about how
American history might have been changed if Chapman had instead been a big fan
of marijuana, but even his seemingly more innocuous fixation would have its own
ruinous effects.

For, whether due to his herculean efforts on
behalf of the fruit, or to other natural factors, America has always been lousy
with apples.

Every autumn, scores of citizens found
themselves burdened with an overabundance of apples and confronted the dilemma
of finding something to do with them; and their amazingly varied responses
stand as a tribute to American ingenuity as well as American frugality and
sheer stubbornness, for it seems that nobody ever suggested that all of the
excess apples could simply be thrown away.

One obvious answer was to encourage people to
eat as many apples as possible, as often as possible. Since there are health
benefits to be gained from eating all sorts of fruits, including oranges and
bananas, you may have wondered why it came to be said that "An apple a day
/ keeps the doctor away," singling out that one fruit as the universal
panacea. The reason, of course, is other fruits were often hard to find, while
American households were constantly filled with mountains of ripe apples that
needed to be eaten. (This bromide, by the way, has been repeatedly updated to
relate the purported benefits of apples to current health concerns; thus, in
June, 2012, MSNBC was reporting that eating an apple a day could help reduce
obesity.) And why were American children so often encouraged to give an
"apple to the teacher"? It meant that there was one less apple around
for harried mothers to deal with. On one Thanksgiving Day, a mother who
couldn't think of anything else to do with them decided to chop up some apples
and add them to the stuffing of her turkey, and thus an otherwise inexplicable
tradition was born.

To achieve the goal of reducing the numbers
of apples in America, no strategy was too bizarre. Did you know that elephants
love apples, and that one elephant can eat up to 500 apples per day? Have you
noticed that virtually every zoo in America includes several elephants? Do you
really think this is a coincidence?

As another strategy to get rid of apples,
desperate Americans began to mash them into a mush and turn them into a
beverage, "apple cider." It didn't taste particularly good, but by
adding some sugar and spices and heating it up, people were somehow able to
persuade themselves that it was the perfect drink for a cold winter's night,
even though virtually any hot beverage would have had the same effect. Enlisted
in the constant struggle to use up apples, men discovered that apple cider
could be made to ferment into an alcoholic beverage, "hard cider,"
which was an unsurprising development because constantly having to cope with a
barn full of apples is enough to drive any man to drink.

There were also efforts to promote eating
apples as a special treat. Take, for example, that bizarre ritual from
America's past, the Halloween game of "bobbing for apples." It would
be difficult indeed to make contemporary youth understand the principles
underlying this seemingly idiotic activity: "You see, you put all these
apples in a big tub of water, and your hands are tied behind your back, and the
goal of the game is to pick up an apple using only your teeth."

"Okay, but what's the prize?"

"Uh . . . . you get to eat the
apple."

"Yeah. Right." For in a world of
doughnuts and Ding Dongs, children easily recognize that apples are not
particularly tasty, all propaganda to the contrary.

And, since even children in the nineteenth
century quickly grew resistant to constantly eating apples, it was decided to
foist them upon the most vulnerable and ignorant consumers available—babies.
Thus, mothers squashed apples to make "applesauce" for their little
ones, and a more filtered form of apple cider, "apple juice," was vigorously
promoted as the ideal beverage for young palates unaware of superior
alternatives.

To persuade their older—and wiser—children to consume more apples, mothers were forced to devise methods of
making apples sweeter and more like candy and other genuine treats. One result
was that strange product, the "caramel apple" or the "candy
apple," produced by dipping apples into vats of liquid caramel and then
sprinkling the hardened coating with nuts. Modern versions substitute
multicolored flakes of hardened sugar to make them look more like scrumptious
treats and less like … apples.

But the most celebrated sweetened apple
product, to finally address my ostensible topic, was the unduly beloved apple
pie. Mothers found that they could slice up apples, smother them in sugar, place
them inside a pie crust, and bake them to create something that their children
might actually eat. Variations on the basic pattern, such as apple cobbler and
apple crisp, soon became staple items of dreary school lunch menus, as many
adults of a certain age will unhappily recall.

Now, many will protest at this point that
they really love the taste of apple pie—and why not? Let's face it, if you dump
mounds of sugar on anything, bake it inside a pie crust, and smother it
with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, it will probably taste pretty good.
Indeed, the same trick works with the horrendous, inedible gunk found inside of
pumpkins, another overabundant fruit that Americans have long struggled to find
uses for. The fact that people eat apple pies, then, doesn't mean that making
pies out of apples is necessarily a good idea, or that this represents the best
possible use of flour and sugar. And one might further question the extent to
which people truly relish their apple pies: hey, if it's all so delicious, one
might critically ask, why do you always feel compelled to pile whipped cream or
ice cream on top of it?

But apple pies did have the virtue of getting
rid of a lot of apples, children could be counted on to consume them, and the
great labors involved in their preparation helped to transform the apple pie
into the ultimate symbol of motherly love and American family values. Thus, a
delicious apple pie being taken out of the oven made the Hardy Boys cherish
their usually intolerable Aunt Gertrude, and the same gesture virtually defined
the sitcom family of the 1950s. Untold thousands of American mothers devoted
hours of labor to slicing apples and making pie crusts to cover them, convinced
that such efforts were virtually essential in order to demonstrate their
devotion to their children and their patriotic fervor. Later, when McDonalds
began to offer some desserts, one logical choice to emphasize the wholesome
appeal of its otherwise unhealthy menu was a miniature apple pie. Thus, this
expedient solution to the longstanding problem of unwanted apples somehow
became enshrined as part of an American trio of icons elevated to a stature
beyond the possibility of criticism: no one could possibly be opposed, it was
said, to "motherhood, apple pie, and the American flag."

Now, finally, there is someone brave enough,
and stupid enough, to defy these false gods, and leaving the deficiencies of
motherhood and the American flag to be dealt with some other day, I address the
problem of the ubiquitous apple pie and say, in the words of George H. W. Bush,
"This scourge must end."

Americans must stop living in the past.
Today, we live in a world defined by globalization; instead of dedicating
ourselves to eradicating our perpetual oversupply of apples, we can simply ship
them to potential consumers all over the world, just as we can import their
different fruits to provide our diets with more variety. We don't have to
squash our apples to make men drunk or quench our babies' thirst; we don't have
to coat our apples with caramel to make our children eat them. And if even the
starving children of Africa express no interest in our apples, we are
prosperous enough to throw them away without any sense of guilt.

And, after taking these steps, we can
appropriately limit ourselves to making pies out of fruits like cherries and
strawberries that actually taste sweet before one adds several cups of sugar
and do not require coatings of flavored cream to make them palatable. We can
stop persuading ourselves that we like a treat solely because it has improperly
been designated as a defining aspect of the American experience. Along with
Johnny Appleseed himself, we can toss the apple pie out of our history books,
forget that it ever existed, and move toward a future of eating only genuinely
appealing desserts.